Read Online Louisa and the Missing Heiress by Anna Maclean - Free Book Online

“Remember that you are a lady! It is unfit, outrageous!”
    And that (I knew such comments gave rise to stubbornness within myself that rivaled my father’s!) made me insist that I would view it.
    “A full jury will view, as the law requires,” Cobban said. “Because of your relationship to the deceased and her husband you may not be part of that jury, but I will arrange a place for you to sit among them. Are you certain, Miss Alcott? A postmortem is not an easy thing to view.”
    “I am certain,” I said. A strong determination was firing through my backbone, a determination to search for the truth about Dot.
    Cobban studied me as if he were looking for something. He found it. “Tomorrow at ten promptly,” he said. As I left, he touched my shoulder, a gesture between a comforting pat and a discreet push. I could not help but wonder: Was that a great tenderness or just polite attention to a lady?
    “Take a carriage home, Miss Alcott. The streets are dark now,” he said. “And dangerous.”
    “I’ll see to the lady,” Preston said, his voice heavy with noblesse oblige.
    As I rode home in Preston Wortham’s carriage, I tried to stop seeing Dot, cold in the morgue, and attempted to distract my racing mind by turning my inner eye to a portrait of home, how it would be when I arrived. Abba would still be in the kitchen, kneading biscuit dough for tomorrow. Lizzie would probably be wih her, helping, and May would be in bed, reading a novel. Father would be in his study, preparing a lecture, probably on the free soil movement and abolition. The front door would be unlocked, even though there was no servant to keep watch over the comings and goings of the house, and even though most of Boston not only bolted their doors but added additional bracing. We had no worldly goods to protect and worry over. Yet that home was a paradise.
    Poor Dorothy. What had her home, first with her mother then with her husband, been like?
    Dorothy was dead. There had been bruises. And whatever had Dot been doing down by the wharves in that part of town?
     
     
    “WE WILL HAVE to order a wreath, and I must mend my black bombazine for the funeral,” I told Sylvia. “The protocols of grief must be observed. I once thought mourning and its many rules to be old-fashioned and melodramatic; loss now teaches me otherwise.”
    It was the next day, and we were back in the attic. The sheet of paper in front of me was blank. For once I was silenced and literally unable to write. The paper had blisters where mine and Sylvia’s tears had fallen on it.
    “What did Abba say?” Sylvia asked.
    “To trust in God’s mercy. We wept together and she is being brave, but it has affected her. So much death . . .”
    I showed Sylvia my journal entry, about the dreams of the night before . . . a dream of Dottie as she had been as a child, still in the schoolroom, shy yet brave, slow to memorize dates and names but quick to sense a storm coming, or a puppy on the verge of illness. The dreams were mostly rehearsals of what had been, as are most dreams of loss, but in some moments Dottie turned away from the familiar gestures of childhood and stared into my eyes. “So much to talk about, dear Louy,” Dottie said. As she spoke I woke up, still hearing her gentle voice.
    Despondent, I felt myself slipping, my friend’s death an unwelcome addition to the oppressive weight already loaded on my shoulders.
    “Mother gave me a dose of valerian and told me to put it out of my thoughts,” Sylvia said. “She seems to think Dot got what she deserved, whatever that means. I admit she has never cared for Dot, not like we did. I wonder why. Is that your story, Louy?” Sylvia touched a pile of pages.
    “Yes. The one Mr. Fields deems unsuitable and lacking in talent.”
    “And to think you actually did go into service. I could never.”
    “And I shouldn’t have, I fear. Abba was right. I spent my nights blacking boots and being chased around the kitchen table. I